Each year, U.S. facilities generate around few dozen billion pounds of chemical waste. A major of these waste are categorized as toxic release because they might cause cancer or other chronic human health effects or significant adverse environmental effects. Another major part of these are believed to generate greenhouse gas that accelerates the climate change.

According to Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), over 20,000 facilities report their toxic release and greenhouse gas emission each year. But which industries are contributing the most?


Moreover, when looking at the GHG and Tri ranking, the number of facilities reporting this number decrease further more so in the next sections, I will focus on specific type of industries when looking at average quantities.



Greenhouse Gas Release Rank by Industry



Toxic Release Rank by Industry




Manufacturing ranking


Greenhouse Gas Release

Toxic Release



Facility Air Pollutants Release in 2014

We’ve seen that the Facilities in this dataset are mostly about Manufacturing, Utilities and Mining. I define a new categories to disentangle between these 3 primary industries and the other, for plotting purposes.


Greenhouse Gas Emission Distribution


Geographical Distribution


Bad player for Greenhouse Gas Rlease

Looking at the relationship of Ranking and emission also reveals what type of industries are the main contributor for the GHG gas.

Again we see that the industries with larger emissions of GHG are Manufacturing, Utilities, Mining, resulting in some Facilities having a pretty bad rank. And the top 10 bad players can be seen from the chart.



Toxic Emission Distribution

Geographical distribution


Bad players for Toxic Rlease

  • it seems that the most responsible industries for TRI emission are Manufacturing, Utilities and Mining
  • the GHG emission seems more balanced between these two types of industries, however Manufacturing, Utilities and Mining have the larger contributors (in term of pounds)


Gas emission from 2010 to 2014

Sum the gas emission per industry, across all States

Toxic Emission

  • Manufacturing, Utilities are the 2 main contributors from 2010 to 2014, with no sign of decrease
  • Agriculture went from 70k to ~2800 tons in 5 years
  • Management decreasd its emission almost close to 0 !
  • Construction almost doubled its emission between 2013 to 2014


Greenhouse Gas Emission

  • Manufacturing, Utilities are (again) the two main contributors from 2010 to 2014, with no sign of decrease
  • Finance did a great job by decreasing its GHG emission to <1000 pounds



Gas Emission per State

Although the idea of gas per State is not appropriate (gas are not contained to state limits), we can however get an idea of which States has the lerger initial gas emission, by summing all Facilities values within a State.